And either way, it takes effort tp fight against those natural inclinations.

It works fine!

But I would add an explicit link to the source page as well - for maximum friendliness to the OC and also to aid people who want to learn more about them and their work.

So like this could work:

- source

Agreed but I want to push you to go further: it’s not just politics that has been so influenced.

Even Google searches - once world-renowned for their recall and precision and overall helpfulness, now are shit. Reddit as well. Twitter… well, apparently was always a hellhole? :-P YouTube was not though - until it was bought by Google.

Enshittification destroys all that it touches. Even/especially governments. Though the same happened to Rome, so many thousands of years ago. And to Russia too, more recently, despite it ostensibly calling itself “communist”/leftist.

I do think that there was a plan to help move it along, but I also think that it might have been an inevitable consequence of (more or less) entirely unfettered capitalism, and that those two worked together to destroy a nation that once was struggling far less than it seems to be doing lately?

Not everywhere though - e.g. lemm.ee tries to keep things open, at least on the instance level, and the anarchist servers (chiefly lemmy.dbzer0.com but iirc slrpnk.net as well) very much do not remove things that many people would expect them to if they had been more driven by a more authoritarian mindset.

In our new community [email protected] for instance, I very much hope that we can remove comments that attempt such a shouting-down as would make people feel unwelcomed to be there - regardless of their political affiliation (so long as the people being shouted down do not DESERVE it for trolling, e.g. “my reason for helping the less fortunate than myself is my belief in the Christian God who guides all my ways” is absolutely fine but “your gawd is shit and u r too, l0s3r” is not).

Exactly. Judgement is such hard work - best to avoid it when possible, but if necessary, not shy away from it either. Although in the latter case some WORK needs to be put in, if the desire is to do it correctly.

So many people claiming “bUt i WaS BaNNeD foR beInG ToO FrIenDlY, i’M ReaLlY sUcH a nIcE gUy”, when it is patently obvious to anyone who looks that that is not the case.

Preemptively let me say that I agree, although there is an entire spectrum along which people can hold their beliefs, and then on top of that there is the strength with which they hold them that can vary a lot - including some who are apolitical entirely as far as they themselves may be aware.

Also, recalling the phrase “first they came for…” - remember that WE are the “right-wingers”, from the perspective of instances such as lemmygrad.ml, lemmy.ml, and hexbear.net. I am not saying that Truth is subjective, but the definitions of those particular terms most definitely are.

So if they exclude us, and then we exclude “centrists”, who themselves exclude people to either side of them… ultimately what does that make us - conservatives ourselves, chasing some kind of ideological “purity”?

Let’s get back to me agreeing with you now, but clarifying why: we MUST be intolerant to those who are intolerant of others. However, to those who ARE tolerant… shouldn’t we be as tolerant to them as we can stand to be? As in, interact with them civilly even if we do not fully agree with everything they say?

So leftist vs. right(-ist?), I don’t care what someone is, so much as I care whether they are tolerant of others. BUT NOT TO THE INTOLERANT (i.e. not the Alt-Right, and also not the Alt-Left that I see hanging out on various Lemmy instances).

I tend to love reading your comments - they are insightful and deep:-).

When people behave identically as a “bot” would - passing along what it has heard, without thinking twice or even so much as once about it - they can act as part of that same, dark anti-pattern. Except the danger is so much more real then b/c they “genuinely” hold their belief?

I thought that a lot of it was due to enshittification reasons to maximize profit incentive, e.g. making it hard to “search” on Reddit, yet exceedingly easy to “post”, while at the same time making it harder to read the community rules prior to doing so, all to maximize “engagement”. But it seems more related to human nature, which will never change.

I find it highly interesting how in the replies to your message people are proving you right:-).

But fwiw, I do want to push back a little on my own irt your phrasing: perhaps it is not so much the intensity of someone’s views as the degree of welcomingness extended to people of all walks. Non-intuitively to some: this REQUIRES that we kick out people engaging in bad faith. However, once that’s done, shouldn’t we extend a welcoming hand to all who come in good faith?

Tbh I may not be expressing myself well there… so I’ll try with more extreme language: Nazis are bad, and thereby the Alt-Right that extends a welcoming hand to neo-nazis are bad, but centrists and liberals (both of whom would be called right-wing by many people internationally) should be made to feel welcomed? So breadth of political views - so long as delivered in good faith - not that the breadth is the thing desired, but rather the allowance for PEOPLE to come in and talk, if they want, regardless of their political views. The focus here is on the people - the tolerance is just the means to that good end (and this only works if we are intolerant to specifically those who are themselves intolerant).

Discuss.Online seems that way.

Perhaps lemmy.today although that barely has any local content.

lemmy.ca? It does have a [email protected] but other stuff too:-).

On the other hand, if someone repeats a lie often enough, doesn’t that make it true? :-P

Oh wow you are fast - I just commented with the identical example. :-)

Fwiw, Blaze I’m sure was saying that the recourse could be to post the infraction there, so that people become aware of a “power tripping bastard”, i.e. the lemmy.world mod hypothetical example mentioned earlier.

Multiple times communities have been shifted from one instance to another due to precisely this effect. A recent example is how [email protected] now has an alternative [email protected] to help people get out from under the heel of the power tripping admin of that particular instance (described in a recent post in the [email protected] community).

Well, I am not saying that the scenario is a perfect match, just that it reminded me of that:-).

Though to answer your question, if Reddit were all AI slop whereas we were not, then they would be foolish to not exploit (for moar profitz) the source of legitimately true info that could be useful to answer people’s questions, e.g. on topics such as whether and how to use Arch Linux btw. :-P

Very true, but perhaps not universally so. Even if a tenth of one percent of those users who left were to have come here, it would have been noticeable. Instead, we stayed the same size.

Or perhaps they did, and it balanced out people leaving, as too people increasing their number of alts - I sometimes comment or even post from my STW instance, and vote too, so I maintain all 3 on a monthly basis: at the beginning of this past year I would have been considered as “1 user”, whereas now I am counted as 3.

And like, if someone were to leave LW and move to another instance, then likewise they will be counted as “2 users”? (this could be simply a blip as they migrate from one to the other, unless they also occasionally visit their old, and perhaps do an activity like vote or reply, as I have done, in which case it remains as 2 active users)

And in creating the [email protected] community, m_f created a new alt in order to help mod it, and AdmiralPatrick started using their DO account after seemingly having let it lapse. So are those “2 new users” - definitely not.

So even more than us not growing, we might be shrinking more than we realize.

Every time anyone mentions on Lemmy right wing positions it is with only to attack a strawman version

It would help if you would be more precise. You are using a “feels like” statement here, which I have to disagree with b/c it is objectively false: all it would take would be to find a singular example wherein it was not true, at which point “every time” is shown to be invalid.

But often that does occur, yes. Sometimes our choice of wording can impede rather than aid in understanding?

And I say this as someone who seems to be more often misunderstood than not, go figure :-|.

Overall the people here are nicer.

The extremes are higher though - some people were booted from Reddit for a reason, and they came here.

Reminds me of this one:

- source

I think it helps to place labels onto things… and then respect those labels.

Like porn: it can get someone literally fired if they chanced upon such at work - some corpos are just looking for any excuse to cut costs, especially a repeating salary one. But so long as it is labeled, and does not appear outside of bounds… then what is the harm? (more even, studies show that places that ban porn tend to have higher rates of sexualized crime i.e. rape, so the presence of porn literally seems to help society?)

And politics: so many of us here LOVE to discuss it! But what if someone had anxiety, and could not? Could they use something like hashtags, keywords, trigger warnings I dunno, and block out most of it, for the sake of their sanity? If not, then their only recourse would be to opt-out of the Fediverse entirely, thereby taking all of the content that they would have contributed with them…

Full disclosure of my own biases: this is why I am against places such as ChapoTrapHouse from being federated with most Lemmy instances (even as I support e.g. lemm.ee’s desire to keep it) - it’s not that I want it to “not exist” (I’ve enjoyed many of my own interactions there… though it is also simultaneously true that many users from hexbear [or their alts] act as toxic bullies, ignoring people’s consent outside of those spaces, despite being told explicitly not to by their admins), so much as that I want it to be properly labeled & constrained, so that someone does not walk into it unawares, not realize what it is, and then leave the Fediverse entirely having been turned away from us due to their interactions with them.

Likewise much of the content on lemmy.ml is very much not only anti-capitalist, but anti-Western - the former I sympathize with, though the vehemence with which it is delivered and especially the latter will turn people away, as it definitely has me (especially when it abuses blatantly false tropes).

And that is the identical reason why we cannot federate with conservative spaces either, if we want to survive: it is not that we want them to not exist so much as we cannot host their content here, without making THAT action a part of our own identity. And to be clear, I don’t mean content such as “God loves us, each & every one of us” (that’s kinda an awesome thought, is it not, regardless of what we each personally believe?), but rather “I know I speak for [my specific version of a god] when I say that he (she? it? them? other?) hates some people, especially YOUR type in particular!”

But even if we took it as a given, purely for the sake of a hypothetical argument mind you, that we actually did want some type of space to not exist, what are we going to do about it - sabotage their servers? And after they spin up new ones, with better protections - then what? No, the real recourse (imho) is to simply leave them be, yet not choose to federate their content here. We all were young & naive once too - they may grow given time, or not, but that’s their business, and all we can and should (and actually MUST) control is ours.

In all of the above cases - including the pornography example - it is not what the content is (or sometimes not just that), so much as the unfriendliness of it appearing outside of bounds, causing legitimate pain and harm when it is exposed to people.

I think the way to maximize utility is to increase diversity by increasing welcomingness. Sorta like how Linux does not push people into any one distro, or window manager, or anything at all - we each are free to pursue our own paths. That’s fucking awesome!:-P

Lest anything think that I’ve refused to answer the question: it is both. Our (future) political diversity can both be a wedge driven between us - if we allow that to happen naturally - or else a source of strength, e.g. to allow a centrist person to post content unrelated to their political beliefs (woodworking? a game community?), so long as they are respectful of other people’s beliefs in the process. We don’t all have to like one another, just get along. In diversity we find strength… or we could, if we did it right, i.e. if only the ones offered in good faith were allowed to stay while all others given the boot, and even then they need to remain within their allotted lanes.

Preemptively to the people who will scroll to the bottom of this, see me saying that diversity is a strength, and comment or just downvote and move on without bothering to read the rest: fuck you. But to anyone willing to offer a good-faith critique: I am listening.

I mean, as per the comic, yes… literally.:-P

Aren’t we shrinking though? After a spike of 51.8k Monthly Active Users in March, a steady decline down to 43.4k today, with more users per server growing but no more actual activity so probably reflecting alt accounts (I know I’ve done such - starting on Kbin.social, migrating to StarTrek.Website, then Discuss.Online, now making an alt on PieFed.social). We just don’t seem to be bringing in users, notably even as X implodes and we might have picked up a few from there.